Sunday, February 8, 2009

I believe most of us are using broadband instead of dial-up or ISDN nowadays. We opted for broadband because it is supposedly affordable and offering better bandwidth speed to the consumer. Sounds great.

I read an article about "All Koreans to have 1Gbps broadband by 2012" recently. Koreans are currently enjoying bandwidth speed up to 100Mbps, which is too good to be true for us. I'm not sure about the actual quality of their bandwidth, it should be a good news for Koreans, especially Internet geek like us, and create job opportunities for the locals. I would say Koreans are aggressive and they want to be the top in technology, including information technology, LCD, automation etc. As what I posted before, Koreans are the most hardworking people around the world in overall.

Koreans are not only hardworking, many of them are pretty as well.

Unfortunately, the situation is totally opposite in our country, perhaps due to single telco monopolization. I've to admit I hate this. We have about 512kbps to 2Mbps. I consider it as gift because it should be sufficient for us to perform daily routine like surfing, send and receive email, online chatting, software download, video streaming, or perhaps P2P download. Unfortunately, we are not getting what we have. For 1Mbps subscriber, we might getting less than 200kbps most of the time, and sometimes it is under maintenance or under very poor performance. This is totally unacceptable and under satisfaction. We always feel like the telco is sucking our money without deliver adequate quality to us.

Like what I posted before, complaints in this issue were like nothing or no longer a hot topic in our country, as they were immuned to it. You know what the technical manager stood out to reply us? As usual, she is blaming the boom of the unlimited bandwidth subscribers, temporary technical issue, user should upgrade to 1-2Mbps instead of smaller bandwidth, and the primary cause of this is the massive p2p download clog up the bandwidht pipes etc. Hey come on, that's your fault of promoting the 'unlimited bandwidth' package to the end-users. In user point of view, there is nothing wrong with it, and it should be telco's problem and to resolve it.

P2P traffics clogging the bandwidth pipe indeed an issue for all ISP around the world.

Finally, along these few years, the telco willing to spend minial efforts to 'try' to resolve the issue by increasing the allocated broadband bandwidth and implementing bandwidth controller 2 years ago. Bandwidth controller such as Allot and Packeteer able to categorize and limit how much the total bandwidth of certain service and protocol type consume. For example, the telco has about 1000Mbps total uplink bandwidth, and it only limits about 10% (100Mbps) to be cater for p2p download, regardless how many downloads and users it is. Sounds cool!

Bandwidth controller is good to control your bandwidth.

However, by the time they implemented it, p2p encryption is introduced to overcome this limitation. Haha! Millions of dollars were invested by the problem remain unsolved. So how?

From my point of view, they definitely need to continue to enlarge their existing bandwidth pipes by 200%, as more and more subscribers are coming in. As we have been stuck at 1-2Mbps range for too long, it's time to introduce new package of 5-10Mbps bandwidth to attract more revenue.

Bandwidth issue is something like traffic jam issue.

Apart from that, they should introduce and implement p2p caching soonest, such as PeerApp. P2p caching will try to function like a web proxy server, where it will cache p2p and video streaming traffics to the hard disks. This relatively affordable solution for ISP not only able to greatly save up the total bandwidth while reduce bandwidth costs, but also accelerate the p2p download and video streaming, thus improve user satisfaction and productivity. Sounds great to be true, and it is. However, I'm not sure about the mp3/video pattern infringement policy, but defintely it is not that strict in Asia country.

We hope our telco and the CEO will sincerely improve the broadband service for us and for the country other than continuing to reap revenue.